Digital Ethics

Digital ethics aims to understand how subjects – human beings, organisations, computers, software, connected objects, drones and robots, etc. – must act and behave towards each other and those around them. As noted in the Introduction, digital ethics will also have to deal with decisions made by autonomous systems.

Increasingly, the digital world throws up issues that challenge our most fundamental conceptions of human rights, such as the right to security, to privacy and human dignity, and to freedom of expression and information. It is not simply a matter of needing to balance one right against another. Arguably, the challenges are now so profound and wide-ranging that we need to radically rethink our approach to human rights for the digital age.

Digital ethics precedes and extends law, which largely tracks the evolution of digital behaviour with regulation, more often than not endorsing fait accompli usage.28 We need to think more deeply than that. It is necessary to create rules very early on, for example on whistleblowers and other forms of behaviour that challenge accountability and transparency, in order that everyone acts with best intentions in the digital world, without disturbing others and the environment.